Re: Searching a news server

[Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:
> Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:

>> I have a tree that contains a hack like this, but I haven't looked to see
>> how ugly it was.  The following expired I-D may be of interest.

> [...]

>>                    NNTP Full-text Search Extension 

> I think this sounds quite interesting.  If you could pull the hack out
> of the tree, I could try running it on Quimby, and then implement the
> commands in Gnus.  Since most people who read news from Quimby uses
> Gnus, that would give us a good test-bed for seeing whether this is the
> right way to implement this...

I went back and looked at the tree that I actually had, and unfortunately
it's considerably more complex (it does stuff like set up search profiles
and then refile articles into various special groups, and it's very ugly
and not clearly the right way to do things).  So it looks like someone
trying to implement this would have to start pretty much from scratch.  :/

I'll note from experience with things like this that the hard part in
making full-text searching acceptably fast will be incremental indexing of
each article as it comes in.  Many of the existing search engines suck at
incremental indexing.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>